


Common Ground

by CeciDevenrough



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 06:10:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/880352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeciDevenrough/pseuds/CeciDevenrough
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While waiting for the night to pass, Ianto takes up all his courage to talk to Jack about something that lies heavy on his heart. Set during S02 Ep 3 "To the Last Man"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Common Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood or any of the of the characters. They belong to RTD and the BBC. I am simply borrowing them.  
> A/N: Set during the events of "To the Last Man". Spoilers for events in DW "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", TW season 1 and season 2 up to episode 3 as well as episode 12 "Fragments".  
> Comments of all kind are appreciated.  
> A huge thank you goes to gmariam for beta'ing.  
> And an enormous thanks goes to my love for just being you. Sometimes, words are not enough to express what one wants to say.

„Why is it always sex?” Ianto whispered softly. He was sitting a few hands apart from Jack on the rooftop of the Millennium Centre, legs dangling over the edge, staring into the night sky.

  
“It’s a little late for second thoughts, don’t you think?” Jack glanced at him, the right corner of his mouth twitching slightly into the idea of a smile before returning his gaze at the lights of the city that never truly slept. The younger man took a long swig from his beer and placed the bottle back onto the roof before he spoke again. “That’s not what I meant, Jack. I wasn’t talking about us. I’m fine with that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have slept with you earlier tonight.” The older one snorted, a grin spreading on his face, showing off his bright white teeth as he recalled their slow, intense and silent love making on the Hub couch once everyone else had gone home. “I was thinking in a more general way. What it is with sex?”

  
Jack shrugged. “Well, it’s fun.”

  
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Should’ve known a decent conversation about sex with you is impossible. Hell would freeze over first.”

  
“What makes you think hell actually is hot?”

He let out a deep sigh. “It`s a saying, sir.”

The cheerfulness in Jack’s face had vanished. His eyes were clouded as his mind ventured to some distant place in his memories where no one was able to follow him. “Hell is so much more than you think, Ianto. It’s burning hot and freezing cold, it’s a deafening cacophony and an overwhelming silence, it’s –” A strangled sob escaped his lips before he could regain control over himself.

Ianto added calmly, “Sartre stated Hell is other people, but sometimes, it is only a result of your own creation.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that.” Both had been there, they knew it. The two men sat in silence. The horn of an ambulance cut through the night.

“I wonder how Tosh and Tommy are.” Ianto looked down at his hands and chuckled. “And I know you know we both know what they have been or are still doing.”

Jack couldn’t help but laugh. “Wow, did you just make this up, Ianto? ‘I know you know we both know’… I’ve missed your wit, Mr. Jones.”

“Well – thanks, I guess. But see, that is exactly what I was talking about. Why is it that two individuals so often end up in having sex with each other? Why not a tea ceremony? Or singing songs together? Both options can offer you warmth, solace, bonding…” He drained the rest of his beer in a single long gulp.

“Well, set aside sex being a rather entertaining pastime,” Jack replied, “and I guess in the end it all goes back to basic instincts as survival. In times of death, for example, there is a tendency to have sex as a way to ensure your species survives, to refill the gap left behind.”

“So this is how babies are made? Wow, you just destroyed the whole image I had of the world.” The dripping sarcasm in the Welshman’s voice was impossible to miss. His lover’s blue eyes met his own with a reproaching look. He looked into the distance again. “It is neither a very romantic nor a satisfying explanation.”

Jack chuckled. “You know, in my time –” Hurt shadowed the Welshman`s eyes for a second, and Jack understood, the conversation they had had about being able to go back still vivid in his memory. “In the time where I originally come from, everything is so much larger and wider. There are billions of stars and so much distance in between them. Compared to what mankind knows about space nowadays, the size is still beyond your grasp.” Ianto raised an eyebrow. “This is not to belittle you or your species. The first thing I did after my introductory course at the Time Agency was getting drunk because I was feeling helpless and unimportant at the same time as I was feeling wonder and excitement. The pheromones you’re so much attracted to, we all have them in the 51st century. Life is so spread out – sometimes one can travel for years without ever meeting a single soul. So, basically, when we meet someone, nature just takes over and perchance one of the partners gets pregnant and survival is ensured.”  
Ianto exhaled deeply. “So, what you are basically telling me is that your insatiable appetite derives from genetic disposition? That – you can’t help it?”

“To some extent – yes.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? That’s all you have to say? No ‘this is a poor excuse to get away with flirting, sir’ or something similar?”

“Nope.”

Still unable to catch the direction of Ianto`s thoughts, the captain just snorted.

Ianto retraced the opening of the beer bottle with his right index finger. “But you can’t bring it down on being purely genetics. Take Gwen and Owen, for example. They clung to one another because it was their way of coping with what we went through. There was no way Gwen could tell Rhys, and Owen…”

Now it was Ianto`s turn to let his mind wander off into the past. “When Saxon sent us to Tibet, while you were away…” Jack swallowed hard as he heard the Master’s alias, and tried to get rid of the lump forming in his throat. “We had a hard time coping with your absence, everyone trying to keep on going while doing a better or worse job at keeping up the façade, fooling one another that we were alright while even a blind and deaf person could sense we were just miserable wrecks. Owen and me, we`ve never got along very well, but when you left we started hurting each other more deliberately. It almost would have ended with a serious hand-to-hand fight if it hadn`t been for the girls and the cold. Later, we talked about how lonely we felt without you and – well, he begged me to sleep with him.”

Jack’s head spun around a little too quickly, curiosity sparkling in his blue eyes. He was about to ask, but Ianto glared at him, silencing the older man. There was no way he would talk about this now, not as long as what was really behind this conversation hadn’t been said. It had taken him all his courage to start this, he was not sure if he could do it again soon or if Torchwood schedule would allow it.

“He begged me to sleep with him. As a solace. He admitted that sexual pleasure was what he relies on to help him cope with life. We never talked about her, but I’m pretty sure it was different with Diane. It was like bonding with her. Sharing intimate moments and feelings, as Gwen does it with Rhys, as it was with Lisa before she was – converted.”

Jack frowned. Lisa was still a delicate topic, and that Ianto mentioned her so willingly was unusual. “Tell me about it. What was it like, with her?”

“It was –“ The younger man paused as a faint smile appeared on his lips. “Exceptional. Mind-dazzling. Addictive. I’d had a bunch other partners before, but it had never been as satisfying as with her. With the girls before, I had always tried to put up an act, pretend to be someone I wasn’t. Even in bed or wherever else they fancied getting up close and personal. Torchwood London was that huge an establishment that finally I could just let slip the whole masquerade I had been parading around for years and try to find out who I was and wanted to be.” Ianto paused, glancing sideways at Jack. He caught the other man looking at him with an expression he was not quite able to decipher. “Jack? Is anything wrong?”

Jack shook his head, the mesmerised expression not leaving his eyes. Ianto fidgeted from one leg to the other, uneasy with this whole opening up situation, but he had been the one initiating the conversation, so backing out now was out of question. “She was the one who made the first move. I had noticed her several times in the cafeteria and in the car park, but had instantly labeled her as ‘way out of your reach’. Lisa could have picked everyone, there was no shortage of options. You can imagine my bewilderment as she came to my desk one afternoon. She had been accompanying Yvonne Hartman, guiding a handful of UNIT delegates through the premises.” Ianto paused for a moment, his thoughts lingering in those memories. “I’ll never forget her pick-up line. ‘Please tell me I’m not wrong in suspecting you have a secret stash of chocolate in one of those drawers. You would save me from dying of boredom.’”

Jack chuckled. “I bet she was right, wasn’t she?”

The Welshman sighed. “Yep. I opened the bottom drawer and let her choose. The funny thing was that I had, in fact, been refilling that drawer, but at the same time you could find leaflets about various diets in there, too. The Jones family has always had the tendency of being kind of chubby, and I am no exception on that point, although it wasn’t showing at the time. I guess that puberty played nicely with me, but there was no doubt that family heritage would be catching up again, sooner or later. Lisa crouched down to select a candy bar, picked one, and then, she held up one of those advertisements. With a deadly serious face she looked up at me, crumpling this flashy piece of paper in one hand before tossing it in the bin. She said something about too many clones of well-shaped bodies wandering the Earth and invited me for dinner on the same evening before resuming her place at Hartmann’s side. First, I thought this was some sort of weak prank she was pulling on me, but she stepped up to me as I was unlocking my bike to ride home, insisting on the date she had invited me to earlier.”

“Sounds like a girl who knows what she wants.” Admiration was in Jack’s remark.

“She was incredible, Jack. She scraped away every layer of paint I had applied to my own painting through all those years until the original canvas lay bare, uncovered in front of her eyes, and she treasured what she found. Every tiny moment I spent with her made me feel true, at peace with myself. Making love to her was just another part of that process. It made me feel whole, accepted. I guess that’s why I refused to let her go, why I was trying to keep her alive at all costs. I did not want to be lost again, to go back to nothing.”

Jack gently thumbed away the tear that had started to fall from Ianto’s eye. This one grabbed the extended arm before he flung himself to Jack’s chest, holding unto the Captain as if for dear life. Silent tears fell from his eyes, wetting the coat, as soothing hands stroked his hair and back. Jack did not utter a single sound for five minutes, waiting for his lover to speak again. Whatever it was Ianto wanted to get off his chest, almost literally, any perturbation might lead him to change his mind, and although the fist clenching Jack’s heart made it difficult to remain silent, he did. This opening up to him was proof of a trust he had not anticipated, not after leaving the team, leaving Ianto, without a single note.

“I tricked you into giving me this job, because I needed her to be alive, to give me a meaning. She begged me to let her go, several times, but I couldn’t. I fooled myself by repeating she could be saved, that I did everything for her, but it was an act solely based on selfish reasons. I refused to see the pain she had to endure through the cyber-conversion unit with every day of her prolonged life.” Ianto stopped to take a ragged breath. It was more painful admitting all of this to Jack, but the soothing hands on his back were offering the comfort he needed.

“I called you a monster when you killed her, I vowed to let you suffer for her execution. But sometimes, I think I was just talking to myself. Projecting my self-loathing onto you, because you were capable of setting her free, releasing her from her pain. God, without her, I felt so empty. Everything was hurting from the loss. You know what some say you have to do when in pain? Drown it in more pain. I hoped that being beaten up by those cannibals or tenderized, as they preferred to put it, would do the trick - numb the emptiness and ache. It did at first, but then I realized I was growing tired of feeling pain, of being alone. So I accepted your silent offer for comfort. Those tiny gestures of yours, a warm smile, an occasional hand on my shoulder or back- I blamed myself for feeling comfortable with them. I drowned the darkness inside with the physical* and psychological pain I suffered from being close to you, taken by you, held close. But then, all out of a sudden, it made me feel alive, I felt human again, Jack.”

Jack smiled into Ianto’s hair. The colour of the sky slowly changed from black into a dark shade of blue, a foreboding for the dawn of the new day – the morning that sealed Tommy Brockless’ fate and would undoubtedly shatter a part of Toshiko’s heart.

“I don’t know if you can imagine how confused I was to see Lisa asking me to open the Rift,” Ianto continued. “I thought I had found someone else to – nevermind. Remorse budded and bloomed instantly. I didn’t know anymore what I wanted, who I wanted. She had never lied to me, not once while she was fully human. Fuck--- but I never wanted you dead. With both of you gone…”

Ianto pulled away from Jack’s embrace, wiped the tear stains from his cheeks with the palm of his hands before inhaling deeply. “It gave me time to figure out some things. Who I really was, where I belonged, everything I wanted to matter in my life. There are no words for it, I couldn’t tell you last week, when you took me out… the only way is to let down all my defenses, to show you the canvas, to explain to you the unnamable mess of emotions I can’t grasp myself. Tosh is with Tommy even if she still dreams of the moment Owen turns around to see her as a woman, Gwen is drawn to you like a moth to a flame although she loves Rhys with all her heart. I don’t question the truthfulness of their feelings, but being with someone else never occurred to me. I still am afraid of opening up so thoroughly, to be stripped naked in more than one sense, afraid of being broken again with no one left to catch me when I’m so vulnerable…”

Jack caught his lover’s hands in his own and squeezed them tightly. “Shush, Ianto. Stop, please.” Planting a feather-light kiss on the back of Ianto’s hands, he whispered: “This whole conversation, what is it really about? It’s so not you.”

The response was so soft it was difficult to catch among the bustling sounds of Cardiff awakening underneath their feet. “Because, with all the deceits and the lies that come along with working for Torchwood, with all the secrets we keep from one another, with the bumpy road behind and in front of us, before I get hurt too much to recover… I just wanted to be sure that whatever this particular path holds for us, we are walking on common ground, Jack.”

The captain could feel how tense Ianto’s whole posture was, resembling a tightly tuned violin. A small smile crept on Jack’s lips, the right corner of his mouth curving upwards. “Yeah, I think we are.”

Almost immediately, the younger man relaxed and smiled shyly, but with a bright glow in his eyes. “Glad to hear I just didn’t make a fool of myself.” From one moment to the other, his old demeanour was back in place. “I think that’s Owen’s car over there. I’ll better make some coffee for the trip to the hospital.” He nodded, picked up the empty beer bottle at his side and stood up swiftly. He shot one last genuine smile at Jack before jogging back to the staircase leading down from the Armadillo’s roof to thePlass.  
The

captain stared at the disappearing silhouette, shook his head and looked over the water glistening in waking sunlight. As Gwen’s car turned around the corner of the street, Jack hoisted himself up to rejoin with his team. Whatever it was he had been engaging in by asking Ianto out for a date, he liked the sound of ‘common ground’. It was true what he had said earlier: he wouldn’t change it for the world. But right now, there was work to do, decisions to be made, young men to be forced to sacrifice themselves for the sake of universe’s stability. More often than not, Captain Jack Harkness hated to be the one who had to decide about all those things, but it felt reassuring to know that someone would be there.

“Ianto Jones, who did you want to reassure?” he mused while taking the steps three at a time. “Was it you or me? Either way, thank you.”

 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

* On the issue of physical pain from being close to Jack: this is not meant as implication that Jack was abusing or hurting Ianto in any kind. Ianto has never been with a man before, and as much as Jack will have tried to make him feel at ease and comfortable, undoubtedly, during the first times he still remained kind of tense. So sex with Jack, the first two or three times, was no painless experience.


End file.
